Are you looking for ways to start recruiting students for your school through social media? Attracting applicants to your college through emails and social media is bound to become an important part of your strategy if you expect to grow your enrollment in the coming years.

After graduation, most of your students leave campus and move back home to be near family or embark to a new city to pursue a job opportunity. No longer does the college campus physically unify these former students. But alumni don't have to disconnect from their college and former classmates just because of distance.

Tumblr is one of the most used social media networks that have been rocking the realm of digital socialism since 2007. It has recently gained a lot of fame in the social hub due to its recently added “re-blogging” feature.

You are trying to log in to your WordPress site and then a message pops up on your screen; “Danger, Malware ahead”, your screen goes white and your entire site has been filled up with errorful messages. Now, what would you do?

Page-less websites are one of the fastest growing trends in the web designing domain. This term is previously being thrown around a lot in the circles of web design; however, a majority of the end-users have yet to hear about it. Page-less web designing is a design concept that modifies the outmoded concepts of structure and layout.

Get the word out about education and expect to have students lining up for enrollment! Well, this is easier said than done. The things is, your school is not the only provider around. There are many educational institutions now offering desirable packages that may be better than what you have to offer. So how can your educational institution have an edge? The answer may lie in online marketing.

When you think about it, marketing in the higher education space is really a hybrid of Business to Business (B2B) (Business to Business) and Business to Consumer/Community (B2C) marketing. Clearly, a prospective student is not a business. So of course, it’s B2C, you might say. In addition, choosing a college certainly has an emotional component to it, which is more prevalent in B2C marketing.

Gone are the days when a single press release garnered a slew of calls from reporters who are thirsty for more information. Ambitious journalists recognize the current events and viral media that currently captures the attention of his or her audience, focusing their efforts on providing more of the same.

A lot goes into choosing a Content Management System for your brand or organization, whether you’re looking for a consumer platform like WordPress or Joomla! or an enterprise solution like Movable Type. Variables like ease of use, available support features, aesthetic, and price all play significant roles.

Companies that don’t promote their services on the web are almost invisible today, that’s why many of them resort to Joomla in order to build strong online presence. Creating a website without costly assistance of specialists requires proper guidance on using this content management framework.

The simple mathematics, which can give a good idea of the probability of remembrance of the website by the user is, the more time user spends on your website, the greater the probability of your website to cling to the memory of the users. Another equation can be, the more number of web pages visited by the user, the more the probability of the user to remember, recall, and revisit the website.

The comparison between platforms to determine which one is the best in terms of features, stability, apps and security is nothing new. With the focus of these showdowns mostly on helping users decide which phone is best suited to their needs, the stake of developers typically fails to receive the attention it deserves.

It was only last year, in 2013, when Vine was launched. Today this popular, Twitter’s, project is one of the most downloaded app on both iPhone and Android. Vine is for the video sharing world, what Twitter is for blogging.

I came across this infographic this morning. I don’t think I’ve fully formulated an opinion on how much I completely agree with it, but I don’t necessarily disagree with any of it either. Either way I thought it was controversial and thought provoking enough to share on this channel.

Ever since visual storytelling burst onto the scene, vision-keepers have dabbled with ways of putting an element of “openness” into their craft. The comedy-mystery Clue was originally released with multiple endings, for example, while the legendary French firebrand Jean-Luc Godard once made a film whose projection sequence was determined by the flip of a coin.

Ever since visual storytelling burst onto the scene, vision-keepers have dabbled with ways of putting an element of “openness” into their craft. The comedy-mystery Clue was originally released with multiple endings, for example, while the legendary French firebrand Jean-Luc Godard once made a film whose projection sequence was determined by the flip of a coin.

Well-well, the time has come. You are faced with the choice of your future profession. Sooner or later we all need to become independent, earn our bread and keep the family. Thinking about web designer career? Why not?

In the post-collegiate days when many alumni still remember every word to their university’s spirit anthem, but have conveniently forgotten the basics of their freshman mathematics or history classes, one of two things generally occur when it comes to the relationship between the school and its former student.

It’s been a couple of years since we first shared a report that 70% of respondents don’t actively monitor cost per enrollment or aren’t sure if it’s done. I truly believe that colleges and universities are great at many things including building brand awareness and closing the deal on getting new students in the door, but there is one very important piece that fits between these two elements that is missing.

You’ve dedicated a great time into building your institution and the brand. With so much riding on your institution’s success, it is imperative that you team up with only the most conscientious, knowledgeable, and trustworthy people–particularly when it comes to choosing your vendors.

Easter is just around the corner, and Christians from all over the world are looking for celebrating Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead. The churches hold special services on Easter Sunday, people decorate eggs (plastic, wooden, chocolate), organize Easter egg hunts and egg-rolling.

The Chromebook is still relatively new on the personal computing scene, and somewhat a divisive issue among prospective purchasers. The first Chromebooks were announced at Google’s I/O Conference in May 2011 and were met with little fanfare, but lots of skepticism.

Persuasion is an art. Hardly an arguable statement, however, as any successful copywriter will tell you, there’s more than a bit of science involved as well. To write truly great copy for a product, website, sales pitch, or what have you a basic grasp of human psychology is imminently necessary.

You’d have to have been living under a stone to not have considered embracing social media. But it is becoming increasingly important to market your enterprise adequately through sites such as Twitter and Linkedin.

A website reflects the person or organization it represents. That gives it character. Web users look for uniqueness. They want to find an attractive, user-friendly site. Is one of your goals to stand out from the crowd?

When developing a website, we all want our energy and the money that we put into it to be deployed in the most effective way possible. But everyone who is either a casual or regular web surfer will have comes across a few websites that simply look awful, rendering them awkward and irritating to read and utilize.

There’s a divide between the academe and students, and it can’t be more obvious in their social media activities. While the students have been utilizing different social networking platforms, most universities are still struggling to determine its use.

To reach college students, you need marketing tools that will jump out and grab them. In person, a Postup Stand is an effective way to get in their face, while a popup is the best way to do it online. Whether you are online or offline, take a look at these five pop-out marketing tools.

While it may sound a tad too formulaic, ‘web applications’ is a buzzword today. And, when there is a requirement to create a highly sophisticated web application, you will find a thumping majority of developers leaning towards PHP.

As a writer who has covered business and education in both New York City and Los Angeles for more than a decade, I’ve discovered that good, positive meetings have several things in common. The bad ones – of which there seem to be far more than good – on the other hand, also share common traits. Follow this guide to ending meetings on a positive note.

When it comes to marketing your content on social networks, there are many ways you can go about spreading the word. Instead of logging into each profile one by one, you can use an online tool such as Buffer in order to post your updates and information from a single locale.

Last week I was in the Mango Languages office for a Refresh Detroit meeting and I noticed something interesting, two manikins in the middle of their space. The wall next to them was titled “Tom” and filled with all the aspects of their target user.

With 2014 underway and plans being made for the coming school year, it’s wise to reflect on the marketing techniques you employed during last year’s student recruitment. Having a clear picture of what worked and what didn’t will provide you direction as you decide how to achieve a successful recruiting campaign this year.

As the Average American student loan has reached $29,000 per student and a reported 50% of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, many, including a former Secretary of Education have questioned the value of higher education for the masses.

As a freelance writer who covers the blogosphere, social media marketing, monetized blogging, and the Internet, I’ve seen blogs come a long way since 2007, when I was the business/technology editor at amNewYork. I’ve covered successful trends in blogging, and not-so-successful trends.

With the advent of technology, the world has turned into a maze of wonders, every other turn revealing another mind blowing discovery. One such turning introduced to gaping mouths of technology lovers was Google Glass. This application or one may say the mini bucket of endless information became a darling of media personnel soon enough.

Web designing has indeed become one of the most crucial aspects of building a website. If you’re thinking about developing your own site then the very first thing that you need to consider is hiring a professional web designer.

With the world going crazy behind innovation day after day, it would no more be wise to ignore the latest technologies and only have faith in individual brilliance for classroom teaching. That means if you are a skillful educator with the ability to grab your student’s attention all the time, it is indeed awesome!

U.S. News & World Report has been in the education ranking business since 1983, when it launched its first Best Colleges report. Since then, it has expanded the rankings to include graduate schools, high schools, world colleges and universities and, of course, online educational programs.

Today the purview of social media has been stretched, and it has taken on a new role of disseminating information and entertainment. All kinds of industries, especially entertainment, have benefitted paramount with the advent and development of social media.

012 has been very lucrative for businesses in terms of their brand promotion through social media. When it was Facebook and Twitter, people had their attention confined to these forums only, but the moment Instagram gained popularity the focus diverged. This idea became a reality in 2010 but became a golden pot for marketers 2 years after its launch.

The first step in understanding your online reputation as an educator or school administrator is discovering how the Internet defines you. You must monitor your online reputation so that current and prospective employers will view you favorably.

Technology has indeed transformed our lives, for better or for worse. The perks of living in today’s digital age can’t be denied, though at the same time, it is difficult to ignore the privacy concerns that it has given birth to.

Social media presence is becoming a big factor in a student’s choice of where to go to college. In fact, some publications are starting to rank major universities on the strength of their online presence. And with those rankings, high school students are more apt to seek a college that has a great online presence, one that makes the student feel connected over their social media networks.

If you’re unfamiliar, Vine is a mobile app created by Twitter that enables users to record six-second video clips to share online. Similar to the way Twitter works, Vine users can follow one another to stay up to date on their latest video postings.

It’s essential that we teach our students about all aspects of computing — not only how to program and develop web applications, or how to use the VBA functionality in MS Excel to create efficient macros, but also how to search, download, and share information safely.

Visibility on search engines is crucial to succeeding in the online arena, and your competition knows it. That’s why they may already have created a budget for Google AdWords management. If you’re still on the fence, here are five good reasons to hop on the AdWords bandwagon.

Quick Response codes, commonly known as QR codes are almost found everywhere and if used effectively are an extremely potent way to promote Colleges and Universities. These codes resemble small squares in black and white, and if you scan them with your mobile or tablet they can do things like direct you to a website or point you to download an app.

When you hear the phrase, “your reputation precedes you,” these days, it most likely refers to your online reputation. Considering that nearly 40 percent of employers are utilizing social media networks to research job candidates, online reputation management is just as – or more – important than a polished resume.

As a freelancer who has been involved in creating the literature that promotes volunteer causes for both colleges and alumni associations, I can attest that it has become clear that recruiting the best volunteers is the foundation on which every fundraising organization or nonprofit is built.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there are few things in this world sadder than a neglected, forgotten blog. The Internet is full of them – the Sarah McLachlan dog commercial dogs of the digital world. Forgotten. Abandoned. Desperate for love.

Students are back in the classroom, allowing education enterprises and higher education institutions to focus on recruiting next year’s class. Instead of targeting incoming students with internet marketing campaigns, schools, colleges and other education-based businesses are returning to the “old-school” medium of radio advertising.

I saw the infographic below the other day and it is a powerful reminder that it can only take one bad egg to very negatively damage your brand. Yes this is even true for higher education institutions that have been around for decades or sometimes centuries.

In May of 2013, the Georgia Institute of Technology stunned the educational world by announcing plans to offer the first ever Master’s degree program via Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). MOOCs are online courses that encourage potentially thousands of students around the globe to learn via open access of course information.

This month, students from around the country will head off to college. This group of college-bound millennials may be the most “connected” generation to date. As the director of the Pew Research Center said, “we are in the midst of the largest experiment in human history” as societies and cultures adopt new technologies to communicate.

Although technology is changing education rapidly, many schools in the U.S. still cannot take advantage of the digital learning tools because they don’t have high-speed Internet connections. That is why President Obama has recently introduced ConnectED, which is his breakthrough plan for connecting all schools to the digital era.

Facebook recently announced an updated version of their promotional guidelines, with the biggest overall change being the removal of their previous requirement that all promotions be handled with third-party applications. To put it simply, now folks using Facebook can use the site to create and run their promotions.

As a professional marketer or web developer, you’ve no doubt heard about responsive web design, or the ability to configure content according to device. Because of its fluid nature, responsive web design (RWD) has become the gold standard for website projects across various industries.

The expense involved in recruiting the best qualified students and student athletes is enormous. The marketing budgets in highly competitive secondary and post-secondary schools rivals that of many corporations. The use of similar strategies is common with print media, television, and internet all featured in addition to the expanding areas of social media marketing and internet marketing.

Good morning everybody! This is a bit of a different thing, but I wanted to share it out nonetheless. Late last night, @EricStoller and @PetePereira were itching to do some chatting about a higher ed topic.

Social media has become such a regular part of our personal lives that we sometimes overlook its potential in our professional lives. I have invested time and effort in making social media a regular part of reaching out to potential clients, and university and college professionals who want to attract potential students need to do the same.

Students across the country are getting ready to go back to school, but that may not mean leaving the house — it may mean opening a laptop. According to U.S. News and World Report, more than 60 percent of colleges and universities offer online programs, an increase of almost 50 percent from 10 years ago.

It wasn’t too many years ago when researching potential universities was a lengthy process. First, you had to mail a letter to the school requesting information. Then, you’d wait for the glossy brochures to arrive in the mailbox. Next, you’d fill out an extensive application using a typewriter. After you mailed in the application, you’d wait for the mailman to deliver your letter of acceptance or rejection. Multiply the entire process by the number of schools you were interested in, and you ended up with a mountain of paperwork.

I put my life on the Internet. I have a blog. I have a YouTube channel. I’ve turned web-based content creation into my full-time job, and as I work you can be absolutely certain that I’m keeping a close eye on Twitter (my social media portal of choice).

As someone who is trying desperately to amp up your higher learning institution’s enrollment numbers, how do you reach the kids you are hoping will enroll in your programs? Go ahead and log in to your favorite social media website. Somewhere on the homepage should be a series of often eye-catching ads.

Recruiting college-bound students can be a competitive business. “Do we need an app to reach prospective students?” “How many of our resources belong in social media?” “How critical is a mobile-friendly website?”

The original purpose of podcast was for providing entertainment and recreation to users. It has since outgrown its utility and nowadays finds use in education, business, news, and even for advertising. In its simplest form, podcast is an audio or video resource stored in a website, with users accessing it by visiting the website and streaming it to their computers.

Social media is used by almost 100 percent of advancement offices to run campaigns, raise funds, increase donor awareness, build brand advocates, and broadcast news, according to the fourth annual study on higher education social media use spearheaded by mStoner.

Everyone knows that content is king. I’m also a firm believer that nothing is better at marketing than a good word of mouth story from a trusted friend about their experiences with your brand. Storytelling is some of the most important and authentic content that we can create.

Social media feels breezy and fresh when you’re only in it for a bit of fun with friends and family, but the stakes shoot up when organizational brands are on the line. Colleges and universities today are public on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media with info, news and policies about their institution.

Social media is undoubtedly a major part of society in today’s world. Many people will at least check his or her message board at least once per day on the well-known social media site, Facebook. As there are many ways to link content to a Facebook profile, how realistic would it be to link a professor’s Facebook page to his or her own blog for a classroom? Actually, it wouldn’t take much effort at all.

Technological advancements in online learning have reshaped the whole education industry. In the past educators had to remain abreast of latest research on pedagogy and new teaching methods, but it has become equally necessary to keep abreast of latest technological trends.

Online universities and students pursing online degrees are taking the educational world by storm. While online universities like University of Phoenix, Kaplan and Ashford University have been operating for a decade or more, it’s been in the past few years of rising tuition, economic recession and greater Wi-Fi access that online education is starting to bloom.

It is very easy to get caught up wondering what the best ways are to increase engagement on our social media channels. What picture or video will hopefully get liked and shared? Will posing questions in posts lead to more engagement than simply stating facts?

Commencement exercises are finished, and recent graduates are moving off campus. Your school’s jam-packed spring event schedule is finally winding down, and now you can relax. But before you jet off for a much needed summer vacation, ask yourself this question: is your web presence prospective student ready?

The virtual world of teachers is buzzing with activity since they took to blogging. Gone are the days when blogging was just a personal journal of one’s own ideas and experiences. Blogs help us connect with others in a more personal way.

Universities provide a competitive marketplace, where standing out from the crowd can be quite hard. But still, there are some general guidelines which, if followed, can significantly improve your campaign to attract students.

Although there is skepticism within schools about utilizing tablets and smartphones in classrooms, it will eventually become a reality. The same thing was said about Promethean and Interwrite boards when they were first developed. Technology always has a way of being triumphant – especially if people begin seeing the benefits of using such technologies.

Over the last few months I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the future of higher education. Three articles earlier this year really began planting the seeds that we have fundamental things that are broken and need to be fixed.

QR codes — “quick response” codes — are ubiquitous, but they are an often overlooked way to market your college or university. These codes are the small, black-and-white squares that you can scan with your smart phone or tablet and get more information.

Sites should consider adding in a social toolbar to their pages; this has multiple benefits for a wide range of different website owners, from companies through to higher education institutions – they boost your interactivity, enable faster communication, and allow you to better track visitors. Social toolbars can be downloaded and installed on your site via Content Management Systems, or they can be customised and produced using your own code, but generally provides the same strengths in terms of allowing more content to be shared by users.

The term “BYOD” is a growing buzzword that has the world of education on its toes, awaiting the next tech-meets-education revolution. BYOD, short for Bring Your Own Device, has bridged the digital gap between traditional K-12 systems and the gadgets and Web-based platforms the younger generation has grown up with.

We all know that one of the biggest things a marketing department can do is improve visibility, and this is no exception when it comes to higher education.Until now, most higher education marketing professionals have been putting a huge focus on content creation—and for good reason.

From time to time we run across Infographics worth sharing. Discussions about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are everyone right now. Many people are talking about how MOOCs will completely disrupt traditional higher ed, including our own blog here.

This article isn’t specifically about high ed web, but I do hear a lot of high ed web people talk about having difficulties with their boss or struggling in the transition to management. A lot of times we think being the boss is all glamorous, but it is really anything but that. Maybe you manage people or have a manager that you just can’t respect.

For those in the education sector, “the cloud” can seem like a nebulous and unattainable technology goal, used only by large enterprises and corporations. But the cloud has the power to drastically advance the goals of the educational system: to make it easier for institutions to empower their students to succeed while at the same time cutting costs and expanding accessibility.

How are you building or improving your social media strategy? Kenn Elmore, Dean of Students for Boston University, seems to be doing it right. With over 12,000 followers (and counting), @DeanElmore can easily engage with students, professors, and thought leaders in higher education.

Social Media Fatigue Syndrome is a title being batted about for the last couple of years that I’m starting to pay attention to. It may sound easy to scoff at – can updating Twitter really cause fatigue? – but more people are talking about it and it has started to turn up in research journals as well.

I’ve been thinking lately about owning and renting real estate. In the real world, the goal for many is to own property, or perhaps, multiple properties. With property comes increased wealth, a sense of pride and your own space.

As many of you know, Syracuse University is a school that is “smart” at social media. Kate Brodock, executive director of digital and social media at Syracuse University directs a student team that manages SU’s social media presence and they do an admirable job at spreading SU’s message effectively and engaging with a variety of stakeholders online.

When I moved into web management for a higher education institution, our web department was in IT. Shortly after I started, our department moved into Advancement. Even before that move, I began positioning the activities of the web team into a marketing-focused approach – implementing an appropriate analytics package, identifying clear conversion goals, focusing on the user experience, using online marketing tools and more.

As Abbott & Costello demonstrate in this classic video, if you don’t ask the right question, you can end up going around in circles without ever answering the pertinent questions. As anyone who has worked with web analytics knows, there is a dizzying amount of information available to measure user behavior on your web site.

I know you don’t want to admit it, but we all know that you love Kitchen Nightmares as much as I do. I actually enjoy cooking shows of all sorts and like applying their lessons to my somewhat limited selection of Kansas delicacies, which are generally limited to cuts of select beef in different shapes.

The famous XKCD “University Website” comic has made the rounds of higher education web professionals for quite some time, even spurring this amusing .eduGuru post suggesting schools redesign their websites based on the calendar.

In marketing, lead generation is the online interest and inquiries of a service or product made by prospective customers. For universities and online colleges, lead generation is potential students’ interest or inquiry in obtaining an education.

There are times when the prestissimo advancing tech world seems to be a scared little kitten against the flagella of hackers, crackers and the like, with their unforgiving onslaught penetrating every sphere within the realm. In such turbulent conditions, what are the measures, if any, that a user may take in order to stay safe?

To anyone who has been reading this blog for any amount of time the headline here isn’t anything new. We might have felt this way for years, but a new report by CUnet finally gives us the data we have been looking for to support our gut feeling.

As reported on the Daily Texan, student debt hit $914 billion during this year’s second quarter. Unemployment stood at 8.3 percent during the summer season. With increasing student debt numbers and the struggling job market, a college education seems to be an exponential monetary burden that weighs little in the competitive, idle job market.

Sometimes we come across offers that we think would be really interesting/valuable to the community that we want to pass along. The following is a guest post from Mediabistro promoting their Social Media Marketing Boot Camp where .eduGuru readers can also get a $50 discount if you choose to sign up.

Technology has enabled students and colleges to accomplish a lot online. Gone are the days of waiting in line to register for classes or even sitting in a classroom! More colleges are moving courses, orientations and administrative tasks online.

A professional photo shoot is a great way to show off your campus, and ultimately, it really helps ‘sell’ your campus to many prospective students and parents out there. Think of it as a commercial advertising photo shoot, wherein you hire the best professionals to show your product in a good light. To get a good result, you’ll need to prep a little.

The other week a report from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on “Social Media ROI” started a wave of discussions and follow-up posts. One of these follow-up posts written by Michael Stoner does a great job of getting into the problems of the report and the selective nature of the findings.

Retention, it’s that all-important concept that college administrators have buzzing in their ears. When it comes down to it, you want to recruit a great class of first-year students and keep them. Easier said than done.

QR codes have piqued a lot of interest from people who try to be on the edge of good marketing technology but don’t really think through the uses of them. I know that we have all worked with one of those people at one time or another.

Branding is perception. It is the instant gut reaction of what people think when they think about your organization. When we think of McDonalds, we don’t think of “red and gold”. We think of fast food.

Tablets are set to change computing with intuitive operating systems, web browsing, access to hundreds of thousands of apps, and even the option to attach a keyboard. From the start, we knew tablets would be big—they’re more mobile than laptops but easier to interact with than phones.

Over the last 8 years, Facebook has played a pivotal role in higher ed. While it’s beginning was just with current college students, Facebook now plays an influential role in a student’s transition from their high-school network and into their new college community.

If you’ve ever searched on Google (if you haven’t you must live under a rock), you would have noticed above and to the right of the search results, Google Ads. For years these have been a staple for businesses to promote their products and services.

There are three things that must occur at the same time for people to take action, according to BJFogg, founder of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab. The same is true when we try to convince teenagers to leave their comfy homes to move halfway across the world to study.

Over the past few years the big sexy conversation at conferences has slowly morphed from social media to mobile. It is partially because social media is better understood now but it’s also because mobile is the shiny new toy that everyone is trying to figure out.

Who has been wondering what services and software solutions other schools outsource? The time has come to share those results with you. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was a little disappointed with the number of responses.

Take a moment and think about your listing of majors and minors. Really think about it. Is it good? Does it reflect how great your offerings are? Is it even accurate? Is it just a stupid, boring, damned list (if you’re interested in something a bit off the beaten path, check out RIT’s Pathfinder system or look at what the University of Arizona is doing)? If the answer is yes, I want to kick you an idea. Filtrify

It’s time for another one of those great surveys that gives us all a better understanding of something in Higher Education. This “State of Outsourcing” was inspired by my upcoming presentation at the .eduGuru Summit, You Don’t Need IT To Do That.

Let’s face it, higher ed has problems. They have a lot of problems. Whether it’s bad coding, poor graphic design, or a lack of upkeep, someone is always talking about something that’s not working and getting plenty of sympathy from the rest of the web development community.

If hindsight is 20/20, then college reviews from your school’s alumni are worth big pots of magical gold to your prospective students. Put yourself in their shoes (or their parents’): Back when you were looking at colleges wouldn’t you have given anything to learn more about the schools you were interested in from the students themselves?

The University of New Hampshire offers over 100 majors across multiple campuses and enrolls over 14,500 students who engage in daily discovery … including the use of social media. Research shows that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to grow.

All educational institutions work with vendors in one way or another. Some like to bring lots of their services in-house and have almost internal agencies who do the work where others tend to outsource quite a few projects.

Blame Travis over at EMG for this article – he pulled me into this question on Facebook about what higher ed should be doing about Pinterest. It was something that shouldn’t have riled me up, and yet it did.

The beginning of the year is a great opportunity to start fresh and look at everything with a new set of eyes. Something that is easily overlooked is who (or what) has access to your social media accounts. It’s easy to change your password and revoke access from co-workers but it isn’t as easy to identify which websites and services have access to your accounts.

The time has come. After a month of data collection, we are ready to release unto you the results of our largest survey to date. When the dust settled, nearly 500 schools had responded to this year’s CMS survey, more than triple what we had last time.

Just before Halloween, I noticed an interesting Promoted Tweet show up in my Tweetdeck search column for “Emerson College”. It was from @LoyolaAdmission, the Twitter account for Loyola University of Chicago’s Director of Undergraduate Admission, Lori Greene.

As an admissions tool, text message marketing has a bad rap – a really bad rap. Each new recruitment season brings articles like this recent New York Times piece that dismiss text messaging as either ineffective or unwanted by prospectives.

Higher education admissions offices too often think of their job as ushering students through the final stages of the enrollment process. But admissions counselors and marketing teams must think instead like a sales team.

I know why, and I’ll tell you. Obviously the timeliness of this post owes some debt to our revisit of the higher ed CMS survey (which you should join the more than 200 schools that have already taken it this year).

You’ve asked, and we’re responding. About a year and a half ago, we did a survey on what CMSs were being used in higher ed. This data was one of our best participated surveys to date, and is still a popular destination for schools looking into what they should be using.

If you’ve worked in higher ed for a few years, you have probably assisted with an on-campus event during orientation or move-in week. The excitement exuded by the new students is undeniable when they finally arrive.

Traditional best practice in higher ed with regards to Facebook pages is one page to run them all – you have one main “official” page representing all of the stakeholders at your institution – prospective students, parents, current students, alumni, etc.

A majority of people assume a Web page is just a digital piece of paper, but in reality it is just a single step in an entire experience. I will use the illustration below to show how every page is connected to another.

So, we all know this isn’t America’s Next Top Model, and I’m not Tyra Banks (though I got the mad smize… and I’m ashamed I know that term). The fact remains, the fashion industry has much to teach us in web development.

I work for a large, established, data-driven university and was blown away by a demo of your product many months ago. I ran right up to the offices of the people who control the money and said “We NEED this tool.

There was a recent discussion in a specific higher education group in which someone was asking the question, “What is Dreamforce?” I guess they had probably seen the flood of tweets and news about this huge event.

The Millennial Generation is said to be constantly connected through the use of hand-held devices and online media. But how is that technology changing marketing strategies? Take a look at some of these interesting results on the use of social media in US colleges and universities nationwide.

On July 23rd, 2011, I had the pleasure of presenting at the HighEdWeb Arkansas regional conference. My topic was looking at approaching our websites through incremental realignments, rather than sweeping redesigns, and doing so based on information we can get from our analytics

According to a survey of 226 colleges conducted by Varsity Outreach in 2010, an overwhelming majority (88%) of colleges and universities have already created a Facebook presence for their school. So, how are Admissions Offices utilizing Facebook as a community-building tool for their accepted students and incoming classes?

I’m a little bit concerned with the growing frequency of folks asking the question, which I paraphrase: “X has discovered flipbooks. They love the sound they make and want to put everything into it. How do I stop them?”

Those of you who caught Mark Greenfield, Kyle James, and myself on HigherEd Live back in March might recall a brief conversation we had about whether QR codes were more hype than useful. QR codes are an interesting topic that many people either seem really on board with, or really opposed to. Tuesday, Seth Odell brought up the question on Twitter of NFC vs. QR codes over the next five years (Wondering what NFC is? It stands for Near Field Communication. Here’s how it involves RFID.)

A few weeks ago we asked you to fill out a short survey to get an idea of the state of social media in higher education. With 110 unique institutions filling out the survey we have a nice sample size to get an idea of what schools out there are doing.

One-third of all ads viewed on the internet are Facebook ads. They are simple to create, cheap, can be highly targeted and, when used well, very effective. One of the simplest things you can use them for is to expand the reach of your social media accounts by targeting individuals who should be following, but haven’t taken the initiative to find you on their own.

It has been almost three years since Rachel Reuben posted her guide on the Use of Social Media in Higher Education. That was the first homegrown survey and results that were shared on this blog. In the social media landscape a lot has changed in the last three years.

I have a friend whose company recently got funded. Their idea: to introduce a new payments system. If you read their response to the question “What makes you different from Paypal and Google Checkout?”, their answer was simple: “It doesn’t suck.”

In a relatively short period of time, April 1st has morphed from the old, traditional April Fools’ Day into Ignore the Internet Day. Whether you’re Google or Thinkgeek, the first has taken a special place in the heart of internet geeks everywhere, who have seized the opportunity as a chance to take a break and laugh at each other for a day.

October is rapidly approaching. What’s so special about October? According to the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA), any Title IV institution receiving federal money will have to have a cost calculator on their website by October 29th.

Back in February, Gagan Biyani of Udemy.com made a terribly poignant assessment of a particular facet of higher education: we are not in the software development business. We are in the knowledge business, and the other functions that take place on campus are ultimately designed around supporting that goal.

2011 got started at .eduGuru by conducting a survey on the status of video usage amongst us higher ed folks. Video is an increasingly important component of our websites, and it’s not always clear what the best road is to certain goals.

To all our experienced webmasters out there this is probably something that won’t help you out a ton, but for anyone not familiar with webmaster tools accounts, this article will hopefully help you setup accounts with the big boys on the block. Setting up webmaster tools accounts is good for many reasons, but the most obvious is simply to help your website be indexed.

While social media is a powerful tool, many colleges and universities aren’t seeing the results they’d like from their online efforts. To discover why some schools enjoy great success while others seem to be stuck in a rut, I spent the last few months talking to schools like UCLA, Oregon State and Emerson College that are doing amazing things with social media.
Through my research, I discovered several key differences between schools that are leading the pack and everyone else. While I present my findings in detail in my white paper, here are three things that social media leaders do best:
Have a Personality
Whether you belong to a state university or a small Catholic college, your school has a unique personality. While traditional marketing does a poor job of authentically sharing that personality, social media allows you to share the unfiltered voices of real people at your school.
People would much rather connect with you on a personal level than with your institution. For example, ESPN is a mammoth brand, with TV networks, websites, restaurants and magazines. Bill Simmons is a columnist on ESPN known as the Sports Guy who writes a column roughly once a week and hosts a podcast that routinely features conversations with his friends. Who has more followers on Twitter? The answer is the Sports Guy by nearly 400,000 people. On Twitter, Simmons doesn’t break news or stir controversy; he simply offers a unique perspective and personality.
Even if you just take the small step of changing your profile picture from a logo to picture of the person handling the account, you’ll empower that person to share his or her personality and give a face to your logo. “Social media should have a real live personality behind it, and it should be someone that people would want to hang out with,” .eduGuru staff writer Karlyn Morissette told me. “That’s something a lot of schools are afraid of, but it’s what people gravitate to online.”
Build Personal Relationships
On Facebook, we have “friends.” On Twitter, there are “followers.” LinkedIn is all about “connections.” What social media does best is create relationships on a personal level. It makes sense, then, that one of the most useful applications of social media in higher education has been creating personal connections among prospective students, enrolled students, parents, alumni and faculty.
One of the best examples of the valuable connections created by social media is Café New Paltz at the State University of New York in New Paltz. In 2009, the school created Café New Paltz, a custom Ning network for accepted students. This community featured two students, known as “baristas” who answered questions from prospective students and posted content designed to help the new students make the transition to college life. Accepted students could meet each other, find roommates, ask questions and share their excitement for school in the fall. Rachel Reuben, who then worked as the Director of Web Communications and Strategic Projects at SUNY New Paltz, measured the success of Café New Paltz by comparing year-over-year pre-enrollment deposits.
In a 2009 post on .eduGuru, Reuben said her office created the community to help improve the academic quality of the incoming freshman class. She said that the first year of Café New Paltz saw 37 percent of their target audience pay their pre-enrollment deposit compared to 30 percent the year before. Networks like Café New Paltz have achieved success at schools across the country because they help strengthen the ties of accepted students to the institution by strengthening their connections with each other.
Tie ROI to Institutional Goals
As many social media practitioners in higher education have found, the best way to convince administration to buy into their program is demonstrate a positive return on investment. Unfortunately, measurable statistics like comments, followers, clicks and views rarely correlate to a real dollar value, while valuable actions like enrollments and donations rarely come directly through social media. How should you measure the effectiveness of media that is much better at conversations than conversions?
In the white paper, we look at two schools that successfully demonstrated a positive ROI, but went about it two very different ways. The first school, Seton Hall University, established the goal of increasing the enrollment of 2010’s incoming freshman class and eventually exceeded expectations with an 18 percent year-over-year enrollment gain. The social media team was able to attribute much of this growth to their new Facebook group for accepted students by using a metrics tool to examine the actions of applicants within the Facebook group. Seton Hall’s goal lent itself to the use of traditional metrics, making ROI easy to measure.
Oregon State University, on the other hand, recently conducted a campaign with goals that were much more difficult to quantify. The school built its “Powered by Orange” campaign to correct misconceptions about the school by showing what its students were capable of. Students and alumni were encouraged to share their written and video stories of how they are “Powered by Orange” through a number of social channels. Oregon State’s social team measured success by cataloging comments, stories and online participation. By presenting this anecdotal evidence to administration on a regular basis, the social team was granted a larger marketing budget and the campaign has become part of the culture of Oregon State.
How’s your school doing? Are you using social media to blare your message, or are you taking the time to create personal connections that pay off with real results. For more information, case studies and stories from schools around the country, feel free to download “Why Your School’s Social Media Strategy Is Falling Behind: Lessons from the Sports Guy, an Online Café and the Color Orange,” the free white paper from Fathom Online Marketing.
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The content of this post is licensed: The post is released under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd 3.0 license
About the author
Dustin Brady
Dustin Brady is a copywriter at Fathom Online Marketing, an Inc. 5000 Internet marketing company that delivers everything from organic SEO to video production. He’s written articles, emails, Web pages and video scripts for schools across the country. Learn more about Dustin’s white paper series on social media in higher education through the Fathom blog.
This post was written by Dustin Brady

A couple of weeks ago LinkedIn joined Twitter, Facebook, Digg and others by offering their own social sharing button. In some respects this is pretty cool for bloggers, but how does it relate to a college website? As a college web person, what uses would I have for this button? Well I have been thinking about this, and I have a few suggestions.

Every school operates under a business organizational structure that controls the way things get done. Projects and initiatives have approval chains. But how does social media strategy fit into business organizational structures?

Less is more. The idea that an admissions office shouldn’t try to appeal to ALL prospective students but rather focus on the RIGHT students – the ones that are the best fit for the institution – seems like a simple idea. Unfortunately, too many admissions offices out there still play the numbers game.

Ever since I joined .eduGuru back in 2008, we’ve been talking about doing a conference of some sort. Well, we finally got our act together. Mark your calendars – we are partnering with Environments for Humans to bring you the .eduGuru Summit on March 22-23!

It’s that time of year again. The time of year I hate. I mean it. You aren’t likely to find a bigger grinch than this guy right here. But still, I can appreciate that other people love it. What I question, however, is why people love… e-greetings.

By now, many of you are aware of the Facebookgate Redux. This is a continuation of the issue Brad Ward discovered back in 2008. And of course, we saw it for the class of 2014 as well. Companies are creating fake Facebook groups posing as institutions to market services to the students that join.

Last week I talked about the value of an applicant so this week I want to continue that conversation up the channel and identify items on a website that also have value tied to this process. Let’s be honest the first thing that every school just like any other business has to understand is that nobody cares about your product and services (except you).

People love the term ROI. It’s such a sexy term, but quite frankly I think it’s something that is regularly ignored in the world of higher education web. This could be partially due to the fact that it’s a term loved by people with MBAs.

FBConTroller v2.0 was released late yesterday. As the author clearly states, FBController does not, nor can it, hack into a Facebook account. What it CAN do though is to control a Facebook account (write on one’s own wall, others wall, retrieve profile page, retrieve friends list and even attempts to retrieve inbox and send messages) without having to have the password for the account.

Facebook announced platform changes to Groups at their offices in Palo Alto on October 6. Mashable has extensive coverage and reactions to the event here, here and here. If you’re currently using Facebook Groups or Pages to communicate with targeted communities, here’s a helpful guide to how the new Groups option will affect you.

Think about what goes into your social media strategy when launching campaigns. You talk about content, distribution, action, and community management. There’s helpful guides on how to track ROI after you launch a campaign and tools to provide analytics to your team members.

Last Sunday night I had the pleasure of being a guest host on Seth Odell’s new weekly web show Higher Ed Live. You might remember the plug I wrote a few weeks ago. Well after the first two episodes Seth has found a niche where he is providing a ton of value to the higher education web community and doing it in a fun format!

I wanted to thank all of you for filling out this survey. I hope you will all find this information as useful as we do. As you have noticed by now this survey was focused on web services teams or groups for hire to provide help for websites.

For all of the web shops out there that are already set up with eight different people devoted to the content strategy process for your university – see you later. You probably don’t need to worry about today’s post. For the rest of you (by which, I think we’re still talking about nearly everyone), well, here’s a look at roles, responsibilities, and maybe some ammunition when it comes time to staff up.

I know that many of you are in the same camp as me when it comes to the ideal way of setting up effective web governance. The prime idea being that “web communications,” as a discipline and as an organizational unit, isn’t something that answers solely to marketing, public relations, or information technology.

I think that out of any web project I’ve ever dealt with in higher education, online cataloging has got to be the biggest white unicorn of them all. If you scour the web for them, you’ll discover that examples of ‘good’ catalogs are few and far between (and you’ll note I’m certainly not putting my school on the list below… yet).

I attended the eduWeb Conference last week and was delighted by a reoccurring theme: measured results. The topic of analytics was front and center. During Karine Joly’s opening-session talk on marketing measurement strategy it was highlighted that many people in higher education are using analytics.

It is the ocean. A never-ending sea of waves, storms, battles, and challenges. Where we think we see an island of solitude, it’s merely an illusion brought on by fatigue and frustration. What is it? Managing the content of our web sites.

Anyone that has read this blog for any time knows that I consider myself a problem solver first and a web/tech guy second. A few weeks ago I presented a problem solving presentation deck and even further back I’ve talked about how to optimize your email habits, RSS reading time and establishing oneself as an expert.

Yesterday, Noel-Levitz released it’s latest E-Expectations Report about what college-bound students are looking for in terms of online engagement during the admissions process. They surveyed more than 1,000 high school students about their online behavior and expectations. As usual, it contained a wealth of information about where colleges should consider focusing their efforts.

Running off of my previous post, Calculating Engagement: What Do They Want, the battle always arises: which is more important, engagement or ROI? The easy answer is, they’re equally relevant. However, often the former gets a bad rap due to the unusual amorphous nature that it takes and the lack of any solidly accepted structure to measure it. Before jumping to conclusions about either, let’s take a second to define each in terms of interactive, web based outreach.

For the past decade Dreamweaver and Contribute were the primary web workhorses at Luther College. In 2005 EZ Publish, an open-source content management system (CMS), was chosen to process admissions applications.

I’ve always said that I don’t really consider myself a technology or a web person. Instead I think of myself as more of a problem solver through technology. If you remember a while back I wrote a blog post on Email Management Best Practices.

We’re all a flurry in our respective endeavours: creating dynamic content for our site, working on optimizing our text for search, creating opportunities for offline efforts to sync with online communities. But have we really stopped to consider how our target truly wants to receive content?

A few months ago I wrote about how to train content contributors, this article is a little different. It’s meant to be a resource you can point anyone publishing content to the web. The goal is to explain why the web acts different than Word, a general outline of creating semantic documents and how to be a good web content citizen.

When I talk about web optimization I’m specifically talking about all the technical things that you can do to speed up the load time of your web pages. Let’s be honest, there are A LOT of things that you can do to improve this as we will cover over this two part article. The first article will focus on the “why” and the second will focus on the “how.”

This weekend, we had a question come in via Ask the Gurus wondering if we knew of any resources that rank content management systems according to their level of compliance to 508 accessibility standards. Accessibility being the great rainbow unicorn that it is, I was not aware of any list that had been put together to date with that kind of information (beyond a basic yes/no field on some matrix sites).

A few weeks ago Tony Hsieh gave bloggers the opportunity to get an advance copy of his newest book, Delivering Happiness – A path to profits, passion, and purpose in exchange for a review and the ability to give away a free copy of the book.

Back in the glory days of higher education, all colleges had to do to recruit students was to build some ornate stone towers and a reputation for academic excellence and students would flock their doors. But unfortunately, that is no longer the case.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for higher education marketers introducing them to Foursquare. For those of you who aren't familiar with Foursquare, it is a location-based social network that also doubles as a game.

One by one, colleges and universities are taking the next step in web development and moving towards addressing mobile needs. The mobile based web has already begun its move to create another technological generation.

I’ve been wanting to do a post about some of the privacy training I’ve been doing for faculty and staff since the last time Facebook updated its privacy policy. It’s hard to keep track of when, where, and how many times Facebook has changed its privacy policy.

When we started using OU Campus in October of 2006, we signed up for the 25-user license package, and opted for the SaaS (software-as-a-service) model or ‘hosted‘ plan, where OmniUpdate handles the hosting and delivery of the service to us, and all CMS users access the system solely through a web browser .

I taught two classes at Champlain College this semester, both of which wrapped up last week. For one of the classes, an advanced course for seniors called Internet Issues and Strategies, students had to write a final paper/case study about an organization using technology in an innovative way….and wouldn’t you know it but one of my students, Marissa Bentivoglio, did her paper on Champlain’s online recruiting efforts.

So how long has it been since you did a Web content audit on your institution’s homepage? A year? Two? Never? I’m not talking about just surfing from page to page making sure everything checks out but a real content inventory of every page and inspection of the content quality.

Have you ever heard the phrase how you can have too much of a good thing? That’s sort of how I feel about Facebook’s move to add Community Pages. I understand it. It’s not that it doesn’t make some sense. But it feels very much like a case of execution before consideration.

For any of you that are in my social network of friends on Facebook or Twitter, you might have noticed that I have been rather active on Foursquare lately. Ok, that is a real understatement, I’m a complete addict. I’ve gone so far as creating a whole website with all the hard to find Foursquare badge information.

Ok. I’m sure most of us know what’s important. Kyle, for one, has done an excellent job in helping us all – myself included – in understanding how to use analytics to improve our higher ed web pages. But what I’m talking about here is: what’s important to tell your VP or others?

In the beginning, Le Moyne College’s main website was powered by a set of static web pages with a small dose of custom-written ASP to serve as our first entry into content management. As typically happens on campuses everywhere, as Le Moyne began a branding revision in 2008, one common theme that was echoed across campus was the need for a better distributed content management system that could be easily extended to content providers.

April is an incredibly important month for Admission Offices around the country. There’s accepted student open houses, email campaigns, school swag to be mailed, and events across the country to convince top high school students that they should deposit to your school by May 1. What’s the point of all these increased marketing efforts?

Sometimes it’s good to step back from those three-hour conference room meetings or vendor calls from Hell and just laugh at yourself for a bit. Working in higher ed is a demanding, non-stop job but there’s plenty of opportunities to find humor in most situations.

Lately, I have heard Drupal referred to as a “framework” in addition to a content management system. After building several Drupal sites, I would have to agree. A core Drupal installation gives you very little to start with.

You have been asked to increase enrollment and have been given some pretty lofty admissions goals, but your budget has stayed the same, or has maybe even been cut. Sound familiar? If all your admissions marketing ideas have been shot down because of budget constraints, you might be feeling a little desperate.

For some of us, Twitter management may be a luxury (or a curse) that we aren’t able to allot much time to. A necessary tactic for most, we may have students to do this or may be on a weekly schedule of checking ritualistically every few days.

I knew smooth sailing couldn't last forever. Someday, that dreaded negative comment would rear its ugly head on our university Facebook page. I just didn’t know it would be so harassing, misplaced and something that would give me an instant panic attack.

Or as John Palfrey, author of Born Digital, warns, “…some people do certainly share too much information about themselves online. They’re going to have tattoos in the digital space that they want to get rid of a few decades from now.”

The questions around what exactly social media is and its long term impact aren’t exactly new. Personally I’m a data junkie and I feel data always helps make very compelling arguments. What we have here is a great data driven case around what is really happening with social media and the impacts on everything that we do.

If there is one question that serves as the elephant in the room for higher education web development, it’s: “What CMS should I use?” The question is common, but not at all simple, and research data is not easy to come by.

I was recently promoted at HubSpot from an inbound marketing consultant to managing our senior consultant team. With any direct promotion like that, it is definitely a challenge when your previous equals now report to you.

Personally I feel that your website should be consistent. This doesn’t mean that it always has to include the exact same template for every single page, but that the pages should be branded similarly. This means that they should be consistent in color, font, graphics, etc.

Okay, I simply couldn’t resist tossing out a counterpoint here. This topic was started by Mark Greenfield (who was following up on a Steve Krug presentation) and continued here recently by my colleague Nikki.

The driving force of any web site is the content contributors, the people who know every detail of their department and hold the key to student success. These are the people you want publishing web content.

Rather than spending time and money reinventing the wheel by creating Web-based tutorials for popular software titles only to sink more time and money into updating them with each subsequent version, schools can use a lynda.com academic site license to enable everyone on campus access to the entire lynda.com library of titles.

Over the years and in various roles: technical, training, leadership. I’ve served on a number of implementation teams and used a number of data-collection applications: time-tracking, project-management, Web analytics, surveys, other statistics packages. What I have learned from these experiences is that there are three common ways to fail:

Looking for something new to try this spring for your recruiting efforts? I recently saw a demo for CollegeWeekLive and was quite impressed with its features and the possibilities it creates for recruiters across the country.

To expand on my last post about continuing your web education, there are many specific things that you can leverage the web for to build your professional reputation and add to your resume. As people go about continuing their education, at some point everyone becomes an expert in something.

First and foremost I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to fill out the survey. The feedback from this has been amazing and I know everyone has been anticipating the results. These results will help others shape and make informed decisions about their web environment. I have a feeling most of you are already scrolling through it right now, I don’t blame you.

Speaker: Fritz McDonald, VP of Creative Strategy, Stamats, Inc.
(Sorry, I came in late to the session)
Listen to your audience – how many people asked their audience if they WANTED a Facebook page? A network may be better to a Facebook page – your audience might view it as different.

Last month at NACAC, I got my hands on a copy of the Hobsons Domestic Research Report 2009-2010. It’s a fantastic report that every admissions professional should get their hands on, but one set of numbers specifically stood out to me. Hobsons asked sophomores, juniors and seniors about their perceptions of the credibility of college search tools. All you social media cool kids may find the results surprising:

The basic concept of the social web and Web 2.0 is one of conversations and user generated content. Engagement. Interaction. My focus today is on the former, with a dab of latter. Universities are much like other big brands, people talk about us in a lot of places, in a lot of ways, both good and bad.

It seems like forever ago when I last wrote about MySpace on .eduGuru. Actually it was over a year and a half ago when I was exploring Social Media Sites for Higher Education Marketing, but one quote still stands out as an accurate way to describe MySpace.

It all began at 11:59AM with a simple little post from @mherzber. Nothing major, just an observation about some visual displeasure with the first slide of the second keynote speaker’s Powerpoint on Tuesday. And then it got bad. Very bad. Then worse. And worse. And worse. Both the keynote AND the Twitter backchannel during it.

On the evening of Wednesday, September 30, the SUNY New Paltz Facebook Fan Page mysteriously disappeared. At first I thought it was a temporary glitch, but when it was still inaccessible on Thursday afternoon, I knew something was up.

Email is supposed to be a blessing, not a curse. If you would have told people fifteen years ago that email would be just as vital or more vital than the phone was at that time they would have laughed at you.

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you might have caught on that I recently got into the book Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity Book Review: Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig by Lawrence Lessig, one of many that I’ve been meaning to check off my least of to-reads. Let me spoil the review by telling you not to bother reading the review, just go get the book and read it.

Earlier this week I wrote a post on our HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog about marketing creatively. The real takeaway from that post, although you should still give it a read, is that successful marketing hasn’t really changed over the years, only the channel you market through.

Something as simple as a status update that ties to an emotional time in new, current, and former students lives seems to resonate. This has expanded my thinking on how we’ll use this feature going forward.

Email marketing, when done right, delivers the highest return on your investment (ROI) of any marketing medium available. It’s inexpensive, easy to send, and provides the quickest way for someone to see what you have to offer—provided it’s done right. Here are some simple ideas for getting the most out of this lucrative, personalized medium.

How is this for great – one of the first things I got to do after being officially hired by Fire Engine RED was design and buy a Flip MinoHD to use at NACAC. After conferring with Keith, a fellow new FER employee and a compatriot from an old job, I opted for one of our favorite viral video characters, Salad Fingers (Keith went for a Steelers football helmet).

In this short article I’m going to attempt to explain the differences, advantages and struggles of using HTML5 in its current form. It has a lot to offer but browsers still have a little ways to go for fully fledged public adoption.

I said in my eduWEB reflection that I was going to start up a fail series. And this post simply jumped off my fingers. When I was first exposed to this material I wasn’t even thinking about how it applies to my current job and work experience. I immediately thought of my experience in higher education and many of you whom I’ve stayed closely connected with.

The Division III Management Council just released their newly adopted “noncontroversial change to the Division III electronic transmissions limitations.” They’ve given it a retroactive effective date of August 1, 2008 to match when their original legislation went into effect.

I know that I’ve recently covered On-Page SEO, but I’m bringing back two of the specific elements. In my job at HubSpot one of the things that I teach people is how to optimize their site for search engines.

Now granted, I don’t know the situation at every institute, but it seems to be that there is a fairly consistent misunderstanding of the value of a prospective student. Maybe “misunderstanding” is not the correct term.

I love Facebook Ads. They’re easy to set up, targeted, and give you free visibility among your audience, since you only pay for them when they click on the ad and go to your website/page/whatever you have set up.

So a few weeks ago we talked about Off-Page Optimization where the whole strategy there is to get inbound links and to do a good job of internal linking. So after you have mastered internal linking it’s time to get those external links.

This data from the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) was simply too compelling. The article talks about how the majority of Gen Y have not yet taken flight on Twitter claiming that only 22% of 18-24 year olds are on it. However, you could flip this data to say that almost a quarter of them are there so your institution should at least be listening.

We've been using Extensis Portfolio Server and clients for five years between two departments, Public Affairs and Design & Printing Services, to attempt to organize our digital image library of nearly 50,000 images.

Now I know that some web designers out there can’t wait to get to the comment section to “rip me a new one,” but please humor me and read through my reasoning here. I hope you will see this is a well thought out and valid argument worth your time.

A large majority (I hope) of university sites are using a content management system to control the thousands of pages which make up a single university web presence. I am willing to guess that multiple people are editing the content on those pages and they are using some sort of WYSIWYG editor.

Last week we looked at On-Page SEO so hopefully this week you are ready to understand the basics on the other side of the equation. Once again I’m not going to get into all the advanced functionality because I think if you can understand 80% of what you need to know, and quite frankly that is enough for most people to see substantial improvements, then you will be good to go.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not pixie dust or snake oil. It’s a group of fundamental things that when done to a website it makes your site more accessible and usable. The thing that I tell people all the time is “A search bot is your dumbest blindest user.

I ran into an interesting problem the past weekend. While planning a new site, I realized that I was just totally tapped for good ideas for a new site design that would pop and be happy and dynamic. By nature, I am no designer, and I readily admit that.

Last year I hit up the Higher Education Conference circuit asking the question “If nobody is visiting your site does it matter?” in my web analytics presentations. This year I’m really digging into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and as I am thinking about the SEO Best Practices presentation that I’ll be giving at eduWeb this summer it only seems appropriate to start out with a similar question.

It seems I’ve fallen off the radar this month and so have some of my colleagues. Are we dodging the new Facebook? Nope. Now that mainstream media has let all our former classmates, family and coworkers know about Twitter, are we ducking our newest followers? Nope.

In any environment where the nature of the work isn’t fully understood, misconceptions are formed. These misconceptions lead to poor decisions. This is usually the case with media development (web, social, video, etc.) in higher education. We’ve all heard of the project triangle or some variation of that where you have quality, price, and time - each represented in a corner. In this metaphor, you can only choose two of the possible three options.

I am starting a series of posts as an extension to my talk a few weeks ago on Web Standards and Accessibility. These posts will be dedicated to explaining how to make a habit of progressive enhancement instead of falling back on graceful degradation.

So we have looked at 301 SEO friendly redirects and the importance of 404 pages and setting them up properly to track bad URLs. It’s probably also a good idea to explore the rest of the important HTML return codes and what each of them means.

How many iPhones visited your site yesterday? Can you tell me? Could you get it set up if you needed to? At many universities, concerns about the usage of mobile devices (i.e. PDAs and smart phones) are increasing with respect to their web sites.

I’ve been promising this book review of “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” by Avinash Kaushik for near six months and it has taken every week of six months to finally make it all the way through this book. I’ve spoken many times about Avinash and his wonderful blog “Occam’s Razor” which this book being the pinnacle piece of the writings on that blog.

Last summer I did research for my independent study project in graduate school that resulted in “The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communication: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education.” The research was largely done in June and July 2008. During this time, very few universities were actively using Twitter.

I apologize in advance, because this is going to be more of an article of philosophy, than a technical how-to. A while back I wrote a piece on the subject of breadcrumbs. In it, I made a comment about how breadcrumbs are a tool that helps expose the information architecture (IA) of a site to a visitor.

A while back I did a book review of the book Neuromarketing, a great book about how our brains process information, and how marketers can use that knowledge to hone their strategy and their message. Last week, I was turned on (no pun intended) to a book that brought these concepts to the web. Neuro Web Design takes Neuromarketing one step further by discussing psychological concepts, which can then be applied to your website.

I wanted to bring attention to one of my passions, accessibility, and a project which aligns right to it. Twitter has become one of the most popular and quickest social networks to integrate your university or business with.

So if you have been reading this blog for any amount of time you know that in the last quarter of 2008 I made the Higher Education conference circuit presenting at HighEdWeb, Stamats, and Case V. At each of those conferences I presented on the subject of Web Analytics.

A few weeks ago, Andy Budd wrote a piece for his blog called Usability as a Marketing Tool. I couldn’t help but think “duh” as soon as I read the title. The basic premise of his post was that if you could make your website super easy to use, you could use testimonials from your users in your marketing efforts (or advertising efforts in this case).

A few weeks ago, Andy Budd wrote a piece for his blog called Usability as a Marketing Tool. I couldn’t help but think “duh” as soon as I read the title. The basic premise of his post was that if you could make your website super easy to use, you could use testimonials from your users in your marketing efforts (or advertising efforts in this case).

I’ve studied many many websites looking for design, navigation, and architectural ideas and it seems to me that there are three universal pages that ever single site should include. It doesn’t matter what type of site or industry the site represents these three simple pages seem to be universal in both importance and required.

Regardless the programming language the ultimate goal is to spit out as clean, standard and accessible code as possible. I come from a programming background and love all the hard core optimization and am always looking for the best framework. But it doesn’t mean anything if what the browser and user see is sub optimal.

“Saving Big” is a 2-webinar series that will show you how embracing the right digital approach can help you dramatically cut costs while still meeting the needs of your target audiences. It will show you why and how social media can become a very budget-friendly asset in the battle to attract, engage and win over the brightest, but also why and how to save on any publication budgets without alienating readers and compromising editorial quality.

Despite how much people don’t want it to be true, using target="_blank" when coding pages is becoming less and less of an accepted practice. But don’t take my word for it. There’s a reason that strict (X)HTML has dropped the target attribute from valid specs, and really, it’s a good one: designers/coders should not be making decisions for the user as to how a page opens.

Today is my last day at Wofford. Kind of surreal, but I wanted to take the time to give you four tips that apply to internet marketing and web development, but if you take a step back they actually apply to life in general rather well.

Building on my last post, Tracking Flash Interaction with Google Analytics, I showed how to track flash actions with Google Analytics. The pageTracker._trackPageview() function is key to this tracking, but it can also be expanded past flash and into the uncharted territory of “outgoing links.”

From my experience even the thought of optimizing a university website can come as an insurmountable task. After all, normally university sites encompass hundreds of pages usually administered throughout various departments of the university.

If you’re having a hard time convincing your administration that social media is worth the investment, try coming at it from a different angle — and I’m not suggesting writing the “social media strategy” we’ve all been hearing about lately.

Yesterday I posted a case study showing how email marketing is still relevant to Young Alumni. Because it’s the day before Thanksgiving and it’s a little slow I’ve been doing a little more digging into that campaign. A little over a month ago Google Analytics launched some new features including Advanced Segments and Custom Reporting.

Analytics are the cornerstone of benchmarking, with good analytics comes good design/information decisions. Google Analytics has become the de facto standard in analytics reporting, even Kyle James lives and breaths it .

I often receive e-mails from people around campus asking for the “number of hits” their site received for a given time period. (My favorite is “…in the last year, so I can include it in my annual report.”)

A community college has some special challenges, one of which is the demographics of our audience. We offer both “academic” degrees for students looking to get an affordable start to a four-year degree and career programs that provide the skills necessary to enter directly into the workforce.

No links of the week, sorry. Instead here are some rather amusing Halloween Comics. Hopefully you find them more enjoyable? Also you Higher Education Web people out there don’t forget about the .eduGuru Blogger Search Contest. We’ll keep accepting applications until November 10th.

The other day I was going through eduStyle.net looking for site ideas and one thing that instantly stood out and annoyed me was sites that are left aligned. I realize this is a personal opinion and I totally respect other individuals who believe in a left aligned site, but I am still going to present my case. So I hope that you are ready for a little rant?

The web definitely isn’t as simple as it used to be. Back in the ‘90s you could get away with one person who kept up with a website and everything that went into it. This one Webmaster could handle everything. I have the job title of Webmaster at Wofford and I have a hard time grasp exactly what that means and what I’m supposed to do and what I’m not.

After rereading a two year old post over on Analytics Talk it inspired me to go create my own Destination URL builder for Google Analytics. It’s really a pretty simple thing to do inside of Excel and by turning it into a Google Spreadsheet you can share it across your organization so it is easy to keep track every destination URL’s built for various campaigns.

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything in the Social Survey series. Writing about using Social Networks for Higher Education has kind of taken a backseat to Analytics lately, but let’s see if we can’t combined the two into a web marketing gameplan?

Google Site Search is one of those additional functionalities in Google Analytics that is very easy to skip over. Once again I’m picking up a topic that Shelby Thayer already started on Trending Upward, but I think that it’s completely worth mentioning again.

As I’ve written about Google Analytics quite a bit on this blog it’s probably quite obvious that I think very highly of this free service. Making sure that you have the code installed on your site properly is a very important initial step.

Yesterday, I received an email from MoveOn.org that merged the name of the town I live in into the subject line. I’ll admit, it got my attention, as it was the first email I can recall seeing with this type of customization.

I was having a discussion in a forum the other day when someone mentioned that they were changing some pages on there site with the hope of increasing pageviews. As Karlyn is known to do with email metrics the web analytics individual that I strive to be went on the defensive, or offensive if you choose.

I breezed through a bunch of marketing books this weekend, but the one that really stood out as useful was Neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin. If you do marketing in any way, shape or form this book should be on your “to read” list.

Tagging and tracking can be an important way to segment and understand user behavior on your website. Google Analytics offers lots of ways to do this, but finding out how to do it isn’t always so obvious.

The other week Shelby Thayer wrote an excellent post titled, Instantly Actionable – The 404 Page. Reading through her post got me thinking this is definitely a Web Standard that every site needs to implement properly, but very few take the time to do it.

This week I attended a demo of Harris Connect’s email marketing tool. Harris is a popular tool for maintaining alumni communities and the email tool they offer is fairly sophisticated in regards to segmentation your audience to target a message to the audience.

Those of you who have kept up with some of Microsoft’s new toys (or who read my Twitter), have undoubtedly heard of a new little Seadragon based photo interface they have been working on in conjunction with the University of Washington called Photosynth.

A recent article in InformationWeek drew my attention as being worth a second look, Think Beyond Basic Apps For Smartphones. The juice of the article discussing developers spending more time designing applications for smartphones beyond the basic email, calendar, and other basic applications.

This is the first part in a series of solid web standards that I plan on writing. There is a lot of simple web standards, or things that I think should be standards, that people either do the hard way or don’t make their site as user friendly as possible.

This summer I did an independent study research project in pursuit of my MBA (expected graduation is May ’10). The focus of my research was the use of social media in higher education, specifically for marketing and communication.

It was brought to my attention the other day that there are some concerns about e-mail addresses published on our college’s web site and the effect it has on spam. It turns out the filters here run through about 10,000,000 emails a day, about 7% of which are passed on as being actual, legitimate messages.

It’s been a while since I have recommended a book, but the last few books I’ve completed just haven’t passed the test and quite honestly have been rather disappointing, until I started reading Buzzmarketing! This book essentially says throw your traditional marketing out the window. Yes it’s one of those complete change of mindset type books and I really enjoyed the experience.

In my years that I’ve now spent in higher education, one universal truth I have found is that nothing quite moves a project along like when someone much more important and much less web savvy than you deems an issue worth addressing. Such was the case only a couple months after I had started at the university, when the Director of Marketing noticed that new information she had put up on the site wasn’t coming up in search results, and the results that were hitting weren’t particularly relevant to the topic in the first place.

Today I presented an “Introduction to Social Networks” at the Spartanburg Chamber of Commerce. The presentation was designed more towards local businesses, but all the examples I used were specifically Wofford’s Social Network campaigns.

A few weeks ago, Kyle was caught off guard when asked about subject lines at eduWeb. I don’t fault him. Subject lines are tricky – you’re got a minimal amount of characters to convince someone that your email deserves their attention.

Now that my presentation is through here are some goodies for anyone that missed the presentation along with some additional data. This presentation was definitely a good learning experience for myself as it’s really the first time I’ve given a presentation in the hour long format.

Offices all over campus have nice little blue recycling bins. By participating in Trashball™ throwing away paper has never been so much fun! Instead of merely throwing away paper, Trashball™ offers quite an enjoyable distraction by forcing participants to “shoot” the balled up paper ball into the recycle bin.

I’ve been kind of neglecting the SEO part of this blog, so lets get started. The most important page on your college site is your Institutional homepage. For Wofford roughly one third of all pageviews are this page.

Have you heard about this revolutionary new car idea? BMW has a new concept car, called the Gina, with an exterior made of flexible cloth. Doors can be opened seamlessly along with the lights and it’s a car that weighs significantly less.

Michael Fienen introduced this nice tip last week so I definitely want to give him a hat tip! You can read his full post about it, Pingilactic, you say?, for additional details. If you are into all the social media buzz and want to stay in touch with lots of friends across multiple sites then this a definite easy way to streamline part of that process. Although it won’t handle specific commands for each service.

So I’ve got some upcoming presentations this year about Web Analytics for Higher Education and me being the anti procrastinator that I am have started to think about exactly what could I possibly say, like I have EVER had a problem with that before. This past weekend one of those moments of enlightenment came over me and I present to you my full definition of Web Analytics 2.0.

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted something in the Social Survey series, but after seeing this video on ProBlogger, Why I Love Twitter, last week I knew that I was ready to tackle my toughest task yet. Finding a Higher Education use for Twitter.

A few weeks ago I ran an extensive test of a number of free analytic tracking packages. Hopefully nobody noticed the added load time from the extra scripts being run? It’s taken me a few weeks to find the time to write up the results but I think they provide some very valuable insight.

Since coming back from Google Analytics training last week finding the time to setup all the wonderful new tricks that I learned has presented a challenge. This post is a nice little introduction to some of the basics that I learned last week.

On Friday I had the honor of talking to 7th and 8th graders at Bell Street Middle School in Clinton, SC. Bell Street Middle is your quintessential public school in a regular town in the southern United States.

In the last few weeks a few new tools have come out to help in monitoring an online identity. Because of this I think it’s important to take a deeper look into what to monitor. As if you didn’t already have enough things to do in a normal day, there is a whole list of things that require regular monitoring.

Google is EVERYWHERE on the web and because I’ve been thinking about it more and more lately, I think it’s finally time to put some of these thoughts in writing and get some input from the community. I know I’m not the first or the last to have these thoughts, but here they are. So please keep reading and leave your comments of feedback and suggestions.

For the last five months I’ve been putting together a monthly web report for Wofford. This report has been a way to frequently monitor and track our presence online and keep track of our effectiveness.

In a simple explanation del.icio.us is a bookmarking service that uses tags instead of folders to organize bookmarks. Because del.icio.us is an online service it is not restricted to a physical computer.

Optimizing graphics for the web is something that is very important and although many people know that it’s good to do, I think without a full understanding of why most people simply don’t spend the extra time on this.

I just finished reading The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed Book Review: The Baseball Economist the other night. If you’re not a baseball fan then you can skip the rest of this post without offending me.

Wofford College’s president, Dr. Benjamin Dunlap, was turned into an Internet sensation a few weeks ago when a video of his presentation at the TED conference from back in March 2007 was posted online on January 24th. You can learn more about Dr. Dunlap on Wikipedia or Wofford’s President page. Here is the original Wofford press release of the speech.

I am definitely a people watcher and want to understand people better. What people like, how they think, and why they do what they do all fascinate me. I have an extremely eclectic music collection and listen to a little bit of everything because I want to understand why people like what they do.

If you haven’t seen any of the news floating around I think it’s very safe to assume that Blu-Ray will win the high definition format battle over HD-DVD. For those of you that aren’t saying “well duh I could have told you that a month ago”, please keep reading.

So as I mentioned in my first post starting a blog and doing a better job of professional development is one of my New Year’s resolutions. This has been quite an adventure getting the blog to the point that it is now.

Several days ago (or more, seeing how long it actually took me to get this finished, whoopsie), Twitter user @stomer brought up a question to the Twitterverse regarding a common tool we use any time we work in social media these days: “This a fair description?: categories are like table of contents items, tags are more granular like items that would be in index?”